Solution Architect - Hook, United Kingdom - Workday

Description

As a leading global animal health company, Elanco delivers innovative products and services to improve the health of pets and farm animals around the world because we believe making animals' lives better, makes life better. Since 1954, we have provided solutions that support veterinarians, farmers and pet owners to advance our vision of Food and Companionship Enriching Life. Elanco's promise to employees: Together, we foster an inclusive culture where everyone can make a difference, encouraging ownership, growth and well-being.

Position Description:

Historically, the role of IT has been to provide a reliable ecosystem to run the business, drive efficiencies and reduce costs. These areas remain integral, however, driven by the quickening pace of innovation, IT must evolve, proactively partnering with the business to enable new digital business models that power new types of customer engagement.

The Architect role provides technical thought leadership, contributing to the business vision, with the autonomy to make key design decisions, as well as influence technology investments. Therefore, the Solution Architect role requires technical breadth and depth (specifically application architecture, software engineering and SaaS solutions), as well as a proven track record of enterprise delivery.

This role will be positioned to support the G&A Transformation teams running, supporting, and maintaining the capabilities leveraged by these organisations. The role will require strong partnership with architects across our functions and enterprise to ensure strong foundation aligned with architecture, principals, and patterns. Partnership with the leadership of Digital Product Delivery and Product Management teams to help inform strategic direction as it relates to technology decisions.

To be successful the role requires a highly motivated individual, with an innovative mindset and a willingness to drive tangible outcomes. The individual must be able to articulate complex technical topics, collaborate with external partners and ensure quality delivery of the required solution.

Responsibilities:

Technology Design & Delivery

• Own the technical design of all solutions across the G&A and Transformation estate ensuring adherence to architectural principles, technical fit into the G&A ecosystem and clear blueprint for delivery teams to execute against.
• Support product teams in the implementation against the technical design to ensure architectural designs are applied during implementation.
• Own the technical strategic vision across HR, Legal, Finance functions ensuring the technology ecosystem is right sized to support the needs of these functions and continually invested in to avoid technical debt accumulation.
• Work with product owners, product managers to understand the business roadmaps ensuring there is a technology roadmap to support this.
• Own the G&A and Transformation city maps ensuring there is visibility of the entire ecosystem, areas of investment needs and dependencies across the enterprise clearly articulated.
• Partner with enterprise and solution architects to recommend cross functional decisions to rationalise technologies that cut across functions looking for efficiency opportunities.
• Design implementation paths for Line of Business applications (Software-as-a-Service and Commercial-of-the-Shelf), covering commodity/highly industrialised business processes.
• Ability to articulate to a technical level how a solution fits architectural standards. Use this to ensure the portfolio of technologies in this space are right sized for Elanco.
• Understand internal and external technology trends and interpret future digital needs in Elanco where possible showcasing the art of the possible to Product Management to help drive future strategy.
• Focus on reuse mindset introducing technologies that allow easy reproduction of pre-existing tools driving cost efficiencies for Elanco.
• Influence IT investments, helping to maximise existing investments (strategic partnerships), whilst ensuring architectural compatibility.
• Understanding Elanco's technical landscape and building continuous improvement to remove technical debt and reduce spend across G&A solutions.
• Leverage enterprise capability to bring innovation to the G&A function including the emergence of the GenAI technologies.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Partner with Product Management and delivery leadership to help shape the transformation agenda spanning business process automation and enterprise data.
• Proactive partnerships with peers across Business Facing IT (Product Management), Data Engineering & Platforms and TechOps, looking to anticipate needs, influence direction and proactively deliver digital solutions.
• Where required, deep dive key initiatives to help overcome technical incidents, complex problems and/or realise opportunities.
• Establish strong partnerships with key service integrators (vendors), and internal Elanco Engineers helping to ensure technical competency and architecture alignment.
• Establish a strong partnership with Information Security, identifying opportunities/risks. (following standards such as CIS & OWASP)
• Strong relationship with Data Engineering and Platforms team and Data Architect to ensure connected vision across solution and data architecture.
• Externally connected bringing the outside in and art of the possible for leadership across the function
• Engaged across platform teams and understand impacts of technologies like AI and where they may provide opportunities. Partner with product management to bring these ideas forward.

Community

• Proactively engage with the IT community (internally and externally) across multiple channels, looking to share, represent, educate, and inspire.
• Serve as a coach for IT Analysts/Engineers to advance individuals' technical acumen.
• Actively build and stay abreast of emerging technology directions (specifically application architecture), guiding IT and the Business on how to interpret and best leverage emerging technologies.

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience in HR, Finance, Legal domain areas
• Strong technical background with array of different experiences in Architecture space
• 5+ years of experience working with modern application architecture methodologies (Service Orientated Architecture, API-Centric Design, Twelve-Factor App, FAIR, etc.)
• 3+ years of experience working with Cloud Native design patterns, with a preference towards Microsoft Azure / Google Cloud
• 3+ years of experience working within a "DevSecOps" culture, including modern software development practices, covering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), etc.
• Relevant architectural certifications including TOGAF, Google / Microsoft Cloud Architecture.
• Business process automation experience including iPaaS offerings and RPA technologies.
• Experience delivering and supporting key Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, specifically Workday, SAP (reports, BI/BW, API's)
• Experience with interface implementation between SaaS providers (leveraging Integration-as-a-service frameworks)
• Infrastructure experience designing and deploying COTs solutions to cloud.
• Experience supporting digital platforms, including Integrations, Release Management, Regression Testing, Integrations, Data Obfuscation, etc.
• Experience scaling an "API-Ecosystem", designing, and implementing "API-First" integration patterns.
• Ability to build prototypes to show the art of possible.
• Experience defining and implementing large-scale, transformative solutions.
• Strong organizational and communications skills with multiple examples of being able to convey complex technical topics, that resulted in a definitive direction.

Other Information: Occasional travel may be required.

Elanco is an EEO/Affirmative Action Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status